Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five ways that it’s getting hard to update old basketball video games.

As someone who originally got into modding basketball video games by updating NBA Live 96 more than a year after it had been superseded, I’m never going to tell anyone that they shouldn’t work on older titles! There’s novelty in updating an old favourite for the current season, combining today’s rosters with classic gameplay. Of course, it’s fun to go the other way too, winding back the clock in a new game so that we can virtually revisit and play through a nostalgic season with modern mechanics. I’ve found joy and satisfaction in tackling both kinds of projects over the years.

With that being said, continuing to update old favourites years and indeed decades after their release will only ever get tougher. Needless to say, this isn’t a new issue. Speaking from experience, choosing to mod an older release over a recent one has always meant that you’ll soon encounter technical limitations, demographic shifts, and other potential deterrents. Again, that’s not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t continue to play and update a favourite that stands the test of time. If you’re still having fun and are satisfied with what can be done, that’s ultimately what’s important. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to update older games, it would be wise to keep these things in mind.

1. More Players to Create

So, you want to make a current roster update for NBA 2K11 PC? Sounds like a fun way to freshen up a classic, and a project that would probably get quite a few people to dust it off! The catch is that NBA 2K11 was released almost 16 years ago, and it only takes a few years for the landscape of the NBA to change. Sure, there are players in NBA 2K11 who are or were still active as of 2026. There’s LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Al Horford, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Jrue Holiday, Kyle Lowry, Eric Gordon, DeAndre Jordan, Mike Conley, Brook Lopez, Taj Gibson, DeMar DeRozan, Kevin Love, Garrett Temple, Chris Paul…and yeah, that’s about all.

In short, if you were to start from scratch, you’d be replacing and creating hundreds of players! Obviously that’s part and parcel of any major modding project, but the point is that as the years go by, older games will have far fewer players who are still in the league. Going back to NBA 2K11, up until the mid 2010s it had enough active players to assemble several viable lineups before adding any newcomers. 16 years later, there aren’t enough active players in the default rosters for even one makeshift starting five! Naturally it’s easier if you already have a roster to build upon, but generally speaking, if you want to update a game that’s over ten years old, be prepared for a lot of work!

2. Roster & Active Lineup Size

Funnily enough, this is an issue from the early days of our modding community that was resolved as games got deeper, but has since become a problem again. When we were updating NBA Live 95 and 96 PC, we had to deal with the limitation of them having 12-man and 14-man rosters respectively. In NBA Live 95, this meant choosing players to leave out of the rosters; in NBA Live 96, we’d have to use the Free Agents Pool for the overflow. From NBA Live 97 PC onwards, we had full 15-man rosters to work with. Occasionally an injury exception would grant a team an extra player that we’d then have to juggle, but apart from that, the rosters were usually easily managed.

And then, the rules changed. Teams were allowed to have 13 active players instead of 12 during the lockout-shortened 2012 season, and the new limit was made permanent the following year. In 2017, the NBA adopted two-way contracts, which increased the maximum roster size to 17. Teams can now have up to three two-way players, making 18 the current limit. As such, it’s impossible to accurately represent modern rosters and rotations in games that reflect the older limits. There are viable workarounds – two-way players can stay in the free agents, and 12 active players is usually sufficient – but as rules and formats change, there’ll be less accuracy in updates for old games.

3. Fewer Contributors, Smaller Audience

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there were some advantages to updating older NBA Live titles. A lot of people stuck with games for at least a couple of years, so there was continued interest in seeing them updated. The first few NBA Live titles were very limited in what we could do as far as art mods, plus we didn’t have fast connections to download big files, so roster updates weren’t expected to include new courts, jerseys, and player faces. As games improved and became more moddable, our modding projects became bigger in scope, and expectations were higher as a result. It was ultimately a good thing, but it does lead to drawbacks with retro roster modding.

Although some classics such as NBA 2K14 PC retain a dedicated following, most basketball gamers and modders move on every year, or certainly every couple of years. This means that if you want to undertake a large project for an old favourite – like a current season update – you’ll have a smaller audience to share it with. There’ll also be fewer people to lend a hand with art mods, so unless you can do it all yourself, those projects will end up less detailed or unfortunately unfinished. The older a game gets, the more that interest in it becomes niche, and the harder it is to do cool things with it. Once again, I’m all for retro modding, but keep in mind that it’ll be tougher.

4. Inevitable Issues With Ages, Dates, & Bio Data

These issues actually go right back to the beginning of franchise modes, and indeed they’re technically a problem as soon as a game isn’t current. The year the game is set in won’t match the season that the mod represents. Of course, it’s possible to ignore the year that’s displayed on the calendar and in players’ career stats, and just focus on what is accurate. The bigger problem is that player ages are calculated relative to the current year in franchise mode. To that end, players in a current roster update for an older game will end up much younger than they should be. It can get truly ridiculous, with the latest rookie crop not being anywhere near old enough to play in the NBA!

Fortunately, this can be remedied by altering everyone’s year of birth so that their ages are correctly calculated. Incidentally, this is also the solution with retro rosters, so that everyone isn’t too old! The downside is that in games that display the players’ full date of birth, incorrect years are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Still, it’s preferable to players being the wrong age. Other titles simply display ages and even allow us to edit them in-game, making it a much better solution. Granted, this is the easiest challenge to overcome when making an update for an aging game, but the point is that you must be aware of and take care of the issue so that your roster facilitates multi-season play.

5. Some Things Are Impossible To Update

I’ve already outlined some examples of this, but as games get older, one of the biggest obstacles to creating comprehensive and accurate updates for them is that there are some things that we just can’t mod. Whether it’s the first year in franchise mode, the size of the roster, the format of the All-Star Game, the rules of the Dunk Contest and Three-Point Shootout, the way the Playoffs are seeded, “innovations” like the NBA Cup and Play-In Tournament, or audio for new players and teams that have relocated and/or rebranded, it’s impossible to implement those changes and additions. We can re-skin old games to the best of our abilities, but they’ll remain increasingly outdated.

Now, I must admit that “impossible” is a bit of a defeatist attitude. There’s always an outside chance that we’ll finally find a way to update certain aspects of old games, or develop a workaround that’s close enough. That definitely isn’t guaranteed though, so even if we want to adopt the more optimistic phrasing of “we don’t know if or how it can be done at this time“, the bottom line is that we’re currently stuck with a format or other detail that’s outdated. If you’re creating a current season update or another large project for an old favourite, it’s advisable to focus on doing what we know is possible and put together something enjoyable, and then explore more ambitious ideas later.

Modders, are you finding it difficult to keep old favourites fresh with the limitations I’ve covered here? Gamers, what are some of the classic titles that you wish modders would still update, and would you be willing to accept less detailed mods in order for that to be a reality? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.